Sacred Heart, DeSmet, ID
Cecelia Curtis-Cook, her husband Brandon Cook and Fr. Peter Byrne went to a Kateri Tekakwitha conference in Spokane on September 11th. They listened to a lot of good speakers. It’s always good to meet with people from other reservations to see what kind of issues they might be experiencing and how they overcome those issues. Issues like attendance, getting young people interested and just getting the native people to like the church again. Tribes from the west coast to Montana and a few from Oregon come to these conferences.
On September 26th , Sacred Heart Mission had a special Mass for St. Michael. This Mass was held in Worley at the St. Michael’s Church. About 20 people were in attendance. This special Mass was initiated by a community member who had been praying to St. Michael as a novena and wanted to end it by having Mass. Fr. Peter Byrne and Cecelia Curtis-Cook made this happen.
We had 3 people pass here on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. One was really young and died of liver disease, older man died of heart attack, and one of older elders died in her sleep. She had Alzheimer’s. At celebrated Catholic Mass and the gentleman’s family chose to just bury and have a few prayers graveside.
October was really slow, not much going on. We had another death here. This time it was our eldest Tribal Member. Fr. Peter was always going to visit her and bring her communion. She was a very devoted catholic. Her family had Mass in the Sacred Heart Mission church. She attended boarding school here with the Nuns and liked it very much.
Fr. Peter Byrne and Cecelia Curtis-Cook started spirituality classes at the Coeur d’Alene Tribal School. Every first and second Thursdays of the month. Once again, we feel honored to teach the children new ways to pray.
On November 20th, the Sacred Heart Mission staff and Cecelia Curtis-Cook’s husband Brandon and her daughter Niksa went to Gonzaga Preparatory School to say a Mass in celebration of Native American month. We do this every year. Some of the young people are still there and remember us from the years before. It was really awesome to have Niksa with us because she graduated from there in 2019. So many teachers remembered her, and she gave the opening prayer and speech. Niksa is actually the one who started this Mass when she went to school there. Now, they have a Coeur d’Alene Tribal member Christy Daniels who teaches there and she also heads up the Native American Club. This is the first year for this club at G-Prep. Christy made sure that the Native young people at the school participated in the mass. The staff stayed and ate lunch with the students and got to know them better. There were 3 of the young people that are Coeur d’Alene Tribal members.
The morning before Mass at Gonzaga Prep, the students loaded up 4 trucks with food from their food drive, so that the Sacred Heart Mission could pass out food to the needy here on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. Approximately 40 families were fed with this kind and generous donation. The families here on the reservation were very grateful to receive this much needed food for their homes. The Sacred Heart Mission also purchased 25 gift cards so they could buy whatever else was need in their homes. Of course, we ran out of gift cards because we didn’t plan on 40 families showing up. This was the first year we did this, next year we will get more gift cards. We will reach out to the community and ask if they would like to buy a gift card to help out. G-Prep students collected 227,000 pounds of food to be donated to several places and other Tribes in the surrounding area.
